Quotes About Rhetoric

I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

There is practically no area of business where the difference between rhetoric and actuality is greater than in the handling of people.

Hitler as "the only man who can save us

national awakening" it oversaw proved useful, as it allowed the Nazis to label "Marxist" opponents as un-German traitors and terrorists.

Cotton Mather lusted all his life for the presidency of Harvard, a post his father had held, and which the son affected to despise, especially after others were chosen; he was a prig and a meddler; an unscrupulous ideologue and a windy orator; a scribbler who praised simplicity in flowery circumlocutions, so anxious to see his production in print that it might be said of him, with little fear of exaggeration, that he would rather lose his soul than misplace a manuscript.

I was fighting fire with fire, and I responded to propaganda with more of the same.

What's a good lawyer besides a superior bullshitter?...

It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it's unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they'll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding.

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, aposiopesis, the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

From the moment Julia Gillard became prime minister, Abbott's mantra has been: "If you want to stop the boats, you have to change the government." But for that to keep working in his favour, it's best the boats keep coming.

The leading light of the right-wingers in NSW is twenty-year-old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles on AUS in the Australian and his press coverage has accordingly given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn't really deserve.

The author's alliterative description of politics since the 1960 presidential debates: Government by Gotcha.

While JFK had made the sale on a political level, he had not yet completed it on an emotional one.

making as cadence, pace, variety of tone, and especially gestures of the arms, hands, shoulders, and head. Young Frederick was enthralled, and though he could not yet know it, his life's vocation, his true

And you were of the opinion propaganda has to make sense to be effective?

There's never been an era absent of demagogues.

The word 'change' has been abused so many times.

It should be clear to everyone what happens when the populists can set the agenda.

À força de falar, um homem acaba por acreditar no que diz; ao passo que se pode agir contra o próprio pensamento sem viciá-lo e ganhar uma causa má sem sustentar que seja boa, como o faz o advogado ao pleitear.

Lawyers are men who hire out their words and anger.

I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.

After all these years, it's still amazing what Obama is allowed to get away with. He says low gas prices in 2009 were caused by a terrible economy, but then claims that the lower number of illegal aliens crossing the border is because of his border policies, not the same lousy economy.

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice. Theodore Roosevelt

Fascists are not human. A snake is more human.